editing textures

Hi! This is my first post. I think this is a great site, very informative.

Ok, I cant seem to find a direct answer for
this. How would I go about editing CS:s, HL2, etc. texture
files. I know you don't open wad files, thats only for converting
HL1 maps. My goal, is to change the color of a CS:s carpet
texture. I have photoshop 7. Oh, and I already
understand how to create new textures using the vtex utility and
photoshop. I just want to modify exsisting game
textures. Any help or links for this would be
appreciated. Thx!

You'll need GCFScape, first:

Get it here.

Make sure to exit steam.

Open GCFScape, open counter-strike source shared.gcf, find your texture (cstrike/materials/carpet, for your carpet tex, most likely), then find texname.vtf and texname.vmt. Drag and drop your VTF over the vtf2tga exe, and it should output a TGA file which you can edit, and run through vTEX again to create a new VTF. Rename your file, put it in the cstrike/materials dir (In steamapps\username\counter-strike source\) and you should be good to go.

Thanks for the quick response. I followed what you told
posted. However I am having issues finding my newly converted
.tga file. Do I have to specify additional parameters in the
target? Do you know off-hand where vtf2tga.exe defaults its
output? Perhaps I put gcfscape in the wrong directory?

Thanks in advance!

Nevermind Rabidmonkey I got it working! In case you were wondering how I fixed it, I used this http://www.pcgamemods.com/9386/

Thx again u guys rock!